Abraham (Abba) Ptachya Lerner (28 October 1903 – 27 October 1982) was a Russian-born British economist. Abraham (Abba) Psachia Lerner was born on 28 October 1903, in Bessarabia (Russian Empire).[1] He grew up in a Jewish family, which emigrated to Great Britain when Lerner was three years old. Lerner grew up in London's East End, and from age sixteen, he worked as a machinist, a teacher in Hebrew schools, and as an entrepreneur.

Lerner contributed to the idea of a social dividend by incorporating it into Lange's original model of socialism, where the social dividend would be distributed to each citizen as a lump-sum payment.[7]

Lerner (1951) developed the concept of the NAIRU (before Friedman and Phelps). He termed it "low full employment" and contrasted it the "high full employment," the maximum employment achievable by implementing functional finance.[15]

^Colander, David (December 1984), "Was Keynes a Keynesian or a Lernerian?", Journal of Economic Literature22: 1571–79, argues for the influence of Lerner's interpretation Keynes in "textbook" Keynesianism.

^"What eventually became known as textbook Keynesian policies were in many ways Lerner's interpretations of Keynes's policies, especially those expounded in The Economics of Control (1944) and later in The Economics of Employment (1951)...Textbook expositions of Keynesian policy naturally gravitated to the black and white 'Lernerian' policy of Functional Finance rather than the grayer Keynesian policies. Thus, the vision that monetary and fiscal policy should be used as a balance wheel, which forms a key element in the textbook policy revolution, deserves to be called Lernerian rather than Keynesian." (Colander 1984, p. 1573)